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Missionaries could also be expelled from the seminary for lack of linguistic aptitude, as an unfortunate man named Heinrich Kittlaus discovered in 1890.46 However, with the notable exceptions of the Leipzig Mission and the Brüdergemeine (Moravians) of Herrnhut, for most of the nineteenth century missionary candidates ‹rst encountered “native” African languages only when they were already abroad.47 Haller did not believe this suf‹ced. He felt that when missionaries were already in the colonies, they would lack inspiration for further learning. “It is not seldom that young missionaries sigh about the language exercises and language study they must attend to after they leave,” he commented. “They come to the mission ‹eld in order ‹nally to begin their mission work after many stressful years of preparation, and now they ‹nd that they once again must deal with spelling, sounding out words and syllables, declination, conjugation, construction . . .” In addition, Haller noted that the often inhospitable climate of the ‹eld had a negative impact on the missionary desire and ability to learn.48 Haller’s complaints about missionary education were not novel. Both Meinhof and Endemann bemoaned the lack of missionary commitment to language. Endemann was particularly distressed by the level of linguistic knowledge among his fellow Germans in South Africa. In 1875 he argued that his colleagues made the “‹ght in the interest of African languages pointless,” because the orthographies they used to transcribe Northern Sotho created “linguistic confusion.”49 Meinhof’s later lectures show that there was in fact no standard orthography for Northern Sotho, and that many missionaries followed no particular rules when recording African languages.50 Endemann suggested that missionaries adopt a universal system of spelling based on Lepsius’s 1863 phonetic alphabet to standardize Pedi script,51 but his advice was largely rejected. The dearth of language training options in the late nineteenth century motivated some missionary societies to send their pupils to Meinhof or enroll them at the seminar. There were similarities between the two institutions . Both Meinhof and his seminar colleagues believed that Germans would receive the best language training in the metropole, not the colony. Sachau helped found the Seminar for Oriental Languages precisely so that civil servants and businesspeople could acquire knowledge of Asia and Africa before leaving home. As for Meinhof, he questioned the validity of throwing students pell-mell into the ‹eld before they acquired a basic knowledge of African languages. In a speech that he gave at the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Meinhof made an impassioned plea The Making of a “Great Africanist” 81 to those who were unconvinced that the metropole was a better location for language study than the colony. He did not disregard the value of continued education in the colony but still insisted that it was “in the home country” that “the foundation (of philological learning) must be laid.”52 While both Sachau and Meinhof agreed that metropolitan training was necessary for their students, they differed on how that training should occur. Meinhof championed the comparative method above all else. He maintained that it was only by understanding the structure of Bantu languages , how they were morphologically and grammatically composed, that a European could grasp their inner logic. If one followed Meinhof’s approach , he would not only memorize a language but become intimately acquainted with its structure. Meinhof’s students would recognize that each language was a separate universe, with its own rules and standards. The directors of the seminar were not interested in the unique makeup of each language or what it said about the mentality of a given people. Seminar teachers had only a few months to train their students, and understanding Bantu or other African languages at a high level of complexity would take too long. The seminar focused on ensuring that its students would be able to communicate suf‹ciently with natives. This was probably the reason why, when Meinhof ‹rst asked that the seminar hire him in 1898, 1899, and 1900, he was rebuffed.53 Sachau was particularly unhappy with Meinhof’s methodology. His rationale for rejecting Meinhof was thus that “the teaching responsibility of the Oriental Seminar is a purely practical one: Instruction for the imperial service, especially with regard to language . . . . There is no room for scienti‹c, comparative, grammar in Seminar instruction.”54 The study of individual languages and not language families would ful‹ll the government’s need for impeccably trained interpreters . Moreover, it was too early for Meinhof’s extensive, comparative endeavors...

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